For 18 years, Santiago suffered repeated sexual abuse by two male relatives and kept quiet about it because they threatened to harm her and her mother.

Last year she finally broke her silence. She sought out the Women's Crisis Center in Manila and told them that her cousin, a police officer, had raped her five times. "I expected at least that he would be thrown in jail," said the 28-year-old, fighting back tears. Instead, her case was dismissed due to lack of evidence, and her cousin is still at large.

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Amid mass public clamor for tough action on violent crime, the death penalty was restored in 1994 here for a number of "heinous crimes," including most categories of rape. Child rape automatically carries the death penalty, as does the rape of minors by their parents, stepparents or any relative.

Since the law was passed, more than 1,200 people, almost all of them men, have been sentenced to death. More than half of those on death row were convicted of rape - and more than half of them are convicted of incestuous rape.

Santiago said execution would have been an appropriate punishment for her abuser. "I want him dead. I want him dead," she stated emphatically. "Because there are other victims aside from me. If I am ever given the chance, I'm going to do it myself."

Increased reporting

Government statistics have shown that reported rape cases increased by as much as 16 percent since the death penalty was restored. Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who also heads the Department of Social Welfare, said recently that she didn't believe more rapes were actually being committed - rather, that more were being reported.

With each new conviction and each new execution - seven so far - people on both sides of the death penalty debate are asking more searching questions about the reasons behind the crime.

Leaders of the Catholic Church, to which more than three-quarters of Filipinos belong, say pornography, drugs and poverty help ex

plain why the the threat of execution does not seem to be deterring rapists.

"If you are drugged, you don't know the consequences of your actions," said Monsignor Pedro Quitorio, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. "The same goes for those who are into pornography, because your passions change your awareness, your consciousness. And it's because of poverty, because of the kind of housing we have. In many instances (homes) are a one-room affair, so somehow it contributes (to incest)."

The church has led a coalition of groups campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, but said it will wait for the hysteria around the debate to die down before it begins lobbying Congress. "At the moment, the argument is very passionate," the monsignor said. "The anger is there, the cry for blood is there. So we are waiting for the day when we have been very well conscientized and we understand the issues."

Social disruption

One man with more insight than most into what causes men to become rapists is Father Junjun Borres, a Jesuit priest who works at Manila's forbidding-looking Muntinlupa jail. The double-walled, high-security compound is where all male convicts sentenced to death are held. Borres, who also campaigns against the death penalty, prays with the inmates in their overcrowded, gloomy cells up until the moment they are led to the lethal injection chamber.

In the months - sometimes years - leading up to an execution, he has time to get to know the prisoners and find out what led them to commit their crimes. In cases of incestuous rape, he has found that some kind of social disruption is almost always a factor: "We found out there's (often) the same profile: a weak relationship between the mother and the father, or the mother is absent from the home. (Perhaps) she works abroad as a migrant worker, and the home is left with the father, (who is) often jobless."

Borres said a daughter is often expected to assume the duties of an absent mother, even "the bedroom duties." In one case a man convicted of raping his daughter told the horrified priest, "Father, it wasn't really rape. I didn't force her. We were lovers."

The priest also points to pover

ty and cramped housing conditions as a cause of rape.

But women's rights groups, also broadly anti-death penalty, reject that argument. Raquel Edralin-Tiglao, executive director of the Women's Crisis Center, says the incidence of rape cuts across class lines. "One incest survivor told me that for the longest time her father had been able to rape her because she had her own air-conditioned room, and when he came in he would close the door behind him and nobody could hear her even if she screamed her head off."

Edralin-Tiglao cites a deeper, cultural reason behind the incestuous rape problem. Many Filipino men, she said, believe they have what she calls "sexual access rights" to their children. "I think that's the key to it," she said. "It's not just poverty or whatever, but it's the attitude that they're free to exercise that right."

Other women point to the Philippines' "macho" culture as a factor. "I think men feel that it's the easy way to get at women, to subdue them," said Betty Pena, a counselor at the women's shelter. "It's cultural. What it appears to be is that it's the only way they can put a strong woman down."

Church's silence

Although a Catholic herself, Edralin-Tiglao blames the church for not taking a more forthright stance against sex crimes within families. "They've not said a single word against incest. They're against sex, but they have not made any clear statement against incest so far, except for feminist theologians. I feel it's a great hypocrisy."

There's also a widely held belief that potential rapists simply assume the law will not catch up with them. Monsignor Quitorio said, "People are used to believing that our justice system, our police system is such that they can get away with it."

Father Shay Cullen, an Irish priest with a long history of defending children's rights in the Philippines, has other fears about the impact of capital punishment: "Having the death penalty for rape has made abusers more reckless. They think, 'I've raped one person, so I might as well rape more. I'm going to die anyway . . . I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.' "

Yet the increase in reported rape cases since the reintroduction of the death penalty suggests that rape victims have been given the

courage to report crimes in the belief that they will be taken seriously. Edralin-Tiglao said, "There are young women who have gotten the hope that finally our justice system is working. There are more women coming out and filing their cases, and getting speedy trials."

The survivors of rape - the victims' names used here have been changed to protect their privacy - are themselves divided about the value of executing convicted rapists. Some, like Malou Santiago, want to see their attackers executed, while others disagree.

"I think that even if (the rapist) dies, the victim is still suffering forever. I think that he should be made to suffer as much as the victim has suffered," said Brenda Sanchez, who was raped repeatedly by her father and uncle. She added, "I think the emphasis should be on how to prevent rape from happening."

But that, many fear, is precisely what is not being addressed. "This is the tragedy of the whole thing," said Edralin-Tiglao, "that men who commit such a crime still don't think that it's a crime at all."

As Father Borres put it, "I hope someone would have the time and the energy to look into this, because (otherwise) we can go on executing people, but we will still have this problem in our midst." &lt;